The Censorship of British Drama 1900-1968 Volume 4: The Sixties

TIMELINE

The Sixties:

A Cultural and Political Calendar

1960

Other countries to declare independence from former colonial regimes in 1960 include French Cameroon, Chad, Senegal, Togo, Madagascar, Ivory Coast, Dahomey, Upper Volta, Niger, Mali and Mauritania. The bloody Algerian War of Independence continues

Major Picasso exhibition takes place at the Tate; Soviet Union sends dogs into space; British government agrees to legalise betting shops; First use of traffic wardens in London; Final episode of The Goon Show broadcast on BBC Radio; The BBC Television Centre is opened

Significant new films released in 1960 include Sons and Lovers, Psycho, Spartacus, The Brides of Dracula, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, Peeping Tom, La Dolce Vita, Whatever Happened to Baby Jane, The Time Machine

Rumour of the year in Plays and Players: Elvis Presley to play Hamlet at the Old Vic

1961

America and Soviet Union both conduct extensive series of nuclear tests; Female contraceptive pill becomes available to (married) women in Britain on the National Health; Monday Club established by right-wing Conservative MPs; America sends chimpanzee into space; Beatles’ first performance at the Cavern Club in Liverpool; Bob Dylan’s first performance at Greenwich Village, New York; Private Eye magazine launched; The Avengers first screened; In tennis, the final of the women’s singles championship at Wimbledon is between two British players (Angela Mortimer beats Christine Truman), a British man (Mike Sangster) also reached the semi-finals of the men’s championship

Significant new films released in 1961 include A Taste of Honey, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, The Guns of Navarone, One Hundred and One Dalmatians

1962

America’s first combat missions against the Vietcong take place in Vietnam; First person killed trying to escape from East Germany across Berlin Wall; Death of Marilyn Monroe; Twenty-five smallpox deaths in UK; First Sunday colour supplement starts (Sunday Times); Beatles release first record (Love Me Do); First James Bond movie released (Doctor No) with Sean Connery as Bond; Centigrade first used to record temperatures in Britain; Andy Warhol’s soup cans exhibited; Publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, launching the environmental movement

New television programmes first broadcast in 1962 include That Was the Week That Was, University Challenge, Top of the Form, Z Cars, Steptoe and Son, Dr Finlay’s Casebook, Animal Magic

Significant new films released in 1962 include Dr No, How the West Was Won, The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, Lawrence of Arabia

1963

£2.6 million stolen in Great Train Robbery from Glasgow to London train; Sindy fashion doll first appears in shops; Publication of Robbins Report recommending major expansion of British Higher Education; Great Britain ends its amateur-professional divide in cricket;Beatles release I Want to Hold Your Hand

Significant new films released in 1963 include The Birds, This Sporting Life, From Russia with Love, The Pink Panther and Cliff Richard in Summer Holiday

New television programmes first broadcast in 1963 include Ready Steady Go and Doctor Who

1964

Total of over 300 years in prison sentences given to twelve men found guilty of involvement in Great Train Robbery; Typhoid outbreak in Aberdeen; Report in US links smoking with cancer; Violence and fighting take place between mods and rockers over bank holiday weekends at Clacton, Margate, Brighton and Bournemouth with many arrests; Five new universities open in Britain; Daily Herald closes down; The Sun begins publishing; Jackie first published; First pirate radio station (Radio Caroline) launched; Drilling for oil and gas in the North Sea approved; Cassius Clay becomes World Heavyweight Champion and joins the Nation of Islam, changing his name to Muhammad Ali; First Habitat shop opens; Bull Ring, Birmingham opens; Topless dresses appear in London

Ariane Mnouchkine’s Théâtre du Soleil founded; Jan Kott’s, Shakespeare Our Contemporary published; According to Plays and Players ‘Theatre of Cruelty replaced Theatre of the Absurd as the number one talking point’; ICA exhibition: Violence in Society, Nature and Art

New television programmes first broadcast in 1964 include Top of the Pops, Match of the Day, Playschool, The Wednesday Play and The Man from U.N.C.L.E.; Peter Watkins’s Culloden broadcast

Significant new films released in 1964 include Goldfinger, Dr Strangelove, Hard Day’s Night, Zulu, Mary Poppins

Top singles in the UK include Rolling Stones, Not Fade Away and It’s All Over Now; Animals, House of the Rising Sun; Kinks, You Really Got me; Beachboys, I Get Around

1965

Massive escalation by US in Vietnam war, involving bombers, ground troops and chemical weapons; Civil Rights marches, protests and violence in several states in America; Barbara Castle becomes the first female Secretary of State in the UK (Department of Transport); The intention to adopt the metric system is announced; North Sea gas is discovered; A 70 m.p.h. speed limit is imposed; The Post Office Tower opens; Local authorities are instructed to submit plans for comprehensive schools; Mary Whitehouse founds the National Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association; Miniskirts appear (Mary Quant); Beatles awarded MBEs

First performances by fringe theatre companies The People Show and Cartoon Archetypal Slogan Theatre (CAST); Death of George Devine, director of English Stage Company and the Royal Court 1956–1965; First International Poetry Incarnation held at the Royal Albert Hall

Significant new films released in 1965 include Help (Queen attends premiere), Dr Zhivago, The Sound of Music

Top singles in the UK include Rolling Stones, Satisfaction, The Last Time and Off of My Cloud; The Who, My Generation; The Byrds, Mr Tambourine Man; Tom Jones, It’s Not Unusual; Moody Blues, Go Now

New television programmes broadcast in 1965 include Not Only . . . But Also (Peter Cooke and Dudley Moore), Going for a Song, Tomorrow’s World, Jackanory, The Magic Roundabout

Dylan releases Like a Rolling Stone and starts to use electric guitar

1966

Centre Point, a 32-floor office building at St Giles Circus in London, designed by Richard Seifert for property speculator Harry Hyams, is completed. It remains empty for around a decade; Aberfan disaster—coal tip collapses and destroys school (116 children killed); London School of Contemporary Dance founded

New television programmes broadcast in 1966 include Softly Softly and Till Death Us Do Part

Significant new films released in 1966 include Alfie, The Battle of Algiers, Blow-Up, Born Free, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, A Man for All Seasons, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

Top singles in the UK include Frank Sinatra, Strangers in the Night; Beatles, Eleanor Rigby/ Yellow Submarine and Paperback Writer; Rolling Stones, Nineteenth Nervous Breakdown and Paint it Black; Beach Boys, Sloop John B, Good Vibrations and God Only Knows; Kinks, Sunny Afternoon and Dedicated Follower of Fashion; Dusty Springfield, You Don’t Have to Say you Love Me; Ike and Tina Turner, River Deep, Mountain High; Troggs, Wild Thing; The Who, Substitute

1967

First human heart transplant takes place (South Africa); National Health Family Planning Act passed—Pill available to all women; Entertainment Tax abolished; Breathalyser tests introduced. World’s first ATM installed in London; Laura Ashley opens first shop; First Monterey pop festival (California); UK wins Eurovision song contest with Sandie Shaw’s Puppet on a String; First British colour TV broadcasts; Radio 1 launched and other stations rebranded as Radios 2, 3 and 4; BBC local radio starts; Publication of Desmond Morris’s The Naked Ape and The Mersey Sound anthology (Roger McGough, Brian Patten and Adrian Henri); Forsyte Saga on television; Queen Elizabeth Hall opens

Significant new films released in 1967 include You Only Live Twice, The Graduate, Bonnie and Clyde, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, The Jungle Book

Beatles release Sergeant Pepper and Magical Mystery Tour albums

Top UK singles include Doors, Light My Fire; Procol Harum, A Whiter Shade of Pale; Hendrix, Hey Joe; Beatles, All You Need is Love; Royal Guardsmen, Snoopy vs the Red Baron

1968

Britain introduces Abortion law, decimal coinage, prescription charges and second-class stamps.

Pip Simmons Theatre Group formed; Ed Berman starts Inter-Action; Grotowski’s Towards a Poor Theatre and Peter Brook’s The Empty Space published; Time Out launched, and starts fringe listings

Significant new films include Yellow Submarine, If, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Once Upon a Time in the West, Planet of the Apes

Top UK singles include Louis Armstrong, What a Wonderful World; Tom Jones, Delilah; Simon & Garfunkel, Mrs Robinson; Cliff Richard, Congratulations; Rolling Stones, Jumping Jack Flash and Street Fighting Man

1969

Rolling Stones play free concert in Hyde Park a few days after death of guitarist Brian Jones; Concorde’s maiden flight; Victoria Underground line opens; Britain introduces 50p coin; Open University established; Margaret Atwood’s first novel, The Edible Woman

Oval House, Soho Poly and Royal Court Theatre Upstairs among new performance spaces to open

Television: BBC1 and ITV launch colour TV service; Monty Python’s Flying Circus first broadcast; Civilisation: A Personal View by Kenneth Clark on BBC2 (13 parts)

Significant new films released in 1969 include Easy Rider, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Midnight Cowboy, Kes

Top singles in the UK include Thunderclap Newman, Something in the Air; Fleetwood Mac, Albataross; The Who, Pinball Wizard; Rolling Stones, Honky Tonk Woman; Beatles, Get Back; Plastic Ono Band, Give Peace a Chance; George Harrison, Something; David Bowie, Space Oddity; Bob Dylan, Lay Lady Lay; Rolf Harris, Two Little Boys

INTRODUCTION

Galahad and Mordred

What might come before the public but for his Office we can only guess.¹

In March 1961, the Assistant Comptroller in the Lord Chamberlain’s Office, Eric Penn, replied to a Colonel who had sought advice on behalf of his daughter in connection with an essay on the history and practice of stage censorship she was submitting as part of her entrance examination to Oxbridge. Penn informed the Colonel that the system was very widely accepted as a necessary control, which had worked without significant problems since its inception in 1737. Indeed, the letter exuded a confidence that it remained an essential and effective practice, being in effect a natural life form (‘The censorship is so old as to be almost an organic growth’) which functioned on quasi-Darwinian principles: ‘it selects a man (the Lord Chamberlain) who, by virtue of his position, must be a man of wide experience and great tolerance who substitutes his personal opinion for that of a committee which has the need to work with a quorum’. If this risked making the set up sound dangerously close to dictatorship, there was no need to worry: ‘It gives this man autocratic powers but, as so often happens with our English system of balances, Press and other vociferous sources of protest are so strong as to constitute a very powerful safeguard against any tyrannical use of the powers granted.’²

These comfortable assertions may have satisfied a Colonel and his daughter—they may even have satisfied a University Admissions Officer. But in reality, pretty much everyone associated with the Lord Chamberlain’s Office at St James’s Palace knew that the system was crumbling. The current incumbent, the Earl of Scarbrough, had already made it patently clear to the Home Office that he wanted out—that responsibility for theatres should be removed from his portfolio of duties, in order that he could better concentrate on his other tasks, such as organising the Queen’s garden parties and culling her swans. The sustained adverse publicity that had increasingly come to dominate newspaper coverage of his licensing decisions damaged not only his reputation but that of the ‘establishment’ he was seen to be part of, and, at least potentially, that of the monarch. Some time, something had to give. Of course, the Lord Chamberlain was not without friends and allies. ‘I hope you don’t mind us taking up a lightweight cudgel on your behalf now and then’ wrote the Daily Telegraph in 1963; ‘We would not like you to think that all the Press are against you’.³ And as in previous decades, and as Lords Chamberlain frequently pointed out, the Office probably received at least as much criticism for what it allowed as for what they turned down. But an internal memorandum written by his assistant secretary in the same month as the letter to the Colonel confirmed that ‘the climate of opinion, or at least the vociferous part thereof, is against censorship’, and that ‘any positive action on the Lord Chamberlain’s part is greeted in the Popular Press with indignation’. As the memorandum acknowledged: ‘The writing is on the wall.’⁴ This, remember, when the ‘rebellious decade’ had but barely begun.⁵

There are times during the next few years when the Lord Chamberlain and his Comptroller and Assistant Comptroller seem to have been fuelled more by a sense of obligation to fulfil their responsibilities than by a real commitment to the cause. But St James’s had at least one member of staff who remained rigidly convinced both of the necessity for theatre censorship, and that the Lord Chamberlain was the right person to be doing it. Ronald John Hill had been an assistant secretary in the Office since the mid 1930s, and his enthusiasm for the cause was unwavering. He also knew more about the history and practice of censorship than anyone at St James’s, and it was invariably he who supplied his superiors with details of precedents and historical policy, as well as with carefullyworded letters and briefing documents. When in 1965 he gave evidence in court for the prosecution of the Royal Court over its production of Edward Bond’s Saved, Hill was gently mocked in the press as ‘an upright, greying man with spectacles, who called both counsel Sir’.⁶ He may have come from another era, and held to values which would be confounded by some of the ideas and practices which became acceptable—even fashionable— during the 1960s; but at least the Assistant Secretary was no jobsworth. Hill believed fundamentally in the importance and necessity of the Censor, and was resistant to the last to any substantial change or any diminution of the Lord Chamberlain’s authority. Indeed, whenever he was allowed to be so he was an active campaigner for the existing system, ready to embrace alteration only where it seemed likely to increase the effectiveness of control. Hill would go down fighting, the last to leave the bridge.

Certainly, there are no documents more passionate in their advocacy of theatre censorship by the Lord Chamberlain than Hill’s. In 1962, when the Lord Chamberlain was looking for a friendly journalist to write a sympathetic and ‘Informed Article’ to try and counterbalance the seemingly endless criticism, Hill, at the drop of a hat, produced eleven closely typed foolscap pages designed to persuade readers to realise the debt which the entire country owed to its Censor of Plays, and how lucky they were to have him. It was good stuff, too:

For some time now the Lord Chamberlain in his capacity as Censor of Stage Plays has been under public attack. He has been damned with the faintest of faint praise by the more staid newspapers; abused in the most offensive terms by others; and his actions have been publicly dissected by professional controversialists on television. More understandably perhaps he has also been jeered at from the stage by those actors who revel in the atmosphere of public derision of any authority.

Hill’s testimony did more than defend—it also attacked, mocking the credibility and naivety of the Office’s opponents: ‘If we are to believe what we read every day the Censor of stage plays is a purblind ass, unable to appreciate what is evident to the least qualified journalist or to his Readers’, wrote Hill. In order to demonstrate the risibility of such assumptions, he documented Scarbrough’s educational and professional and political experience, thus affirming the Earl’s credentials: ‘It is worth asking oneself why, immediately he becomes Lord Chamberlain, he should abandon all sensible thinking and deliver himself to the public correction of self-appointed tutors.’ Hill’s point, of course, was that it was not the Lord Chamberlain who was intellectually weak, but ‘those whose interest is the manufacture and exploitation of journalistic Aunt Sallies’ at whom they could then lob stones. Lords Chamberlain ‘as a class’, insisted Hill, had the ability to reach decisions with ‘complete detachment’, while the qualities honed in pursuance of his other duties ‘make it probable, almost to the point of certainty, that he will be a tolerable, impartial, urbane and experienced man’. Moreover, their breeding and life history placed them in the fortunate position of enjoying easy access to the best contacts for advice, since their ‘many ceremonial and social duties’ required them to be ‘continually out of doors and in the company of almost everyone who has attained eminence in government, commerce or the professions’. But the clincher was value for money. Because the Lord Chamberlain’s salary was paid by the Queen, he came as a sort of free gift to serve his country. What else would offer the taxpayer such a good deal? And as an added bonus, no-one could accuse Lords Chamberlain of ideological bias since ‘as Members of the Royal Household they are demonstrably politically neutral’. This supposed lack of bias and inbuilt sense of fairness differentiated Lords Chamberlain from their opponents and detractors, who, according to the assistant secretary, were motivated by class prejudice and an immature antagonism:

Could it be an irresistible incitement to them that the Censor of stage plays is an autocratically appointed Court Official—named as a member of the ‘Establishment’, with a theatrical history of four hundred years, and the holder of an Office which includes, with the traditional task of opening The Sovereign’s carriage door, a title easily corrupted into a reference to chamber pots.

Hill’s document traced much of the recent antagonism to the Earl of Scarbrough’s refusal through most of the 1950s to allow any reference to homosexuality on the public stage; a refusal which had led to the banning of plays by, among others, Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams. By the time Scarbrough had rescinded the policy, much damage had already been done. But rather than apologising, the assistant secretary did his best to recuperate the Earl’s judgement.

To the Lord Chamberlain’s credit or shame, whichever way you look at it, the theatre was one of the last places of public entertainment at which this subject was aired. A review of the contemporary scene with its pervert-traitors and in London one soliciting prostitute in three convicted a man . . . will show I think that he was right at least to be dubious about falling in at once with his detractors’ views.

Hill deployed sarcasm against the enemy, emphasising the decent and gentlemanly values which lay beneath the Lord Chamberlain’s choices: ‘He is so foolish as to think in this troubled world that some courtesy extended to the Heads of States would be helpful; he is so old fashioned as to object to blasphemy or to Christ being represented on the stage for money.’ And Hill derided the altruistic motives lavished on his critics:

It is also the claim, stated or implied, that everyone associated with any theatrical venture who is at odds with the Lord Chamberlain is actuated by nothing but the good of the theatre . . . might it not be that occasionally some of these, driven by poverty or greed, would, but for the Censor, be tempted to diverge from the high standards of the profession and stage some titillating piece of dirt, or propagate some piece of vice that would show good pickings. But no, apparently it is all Sir Galahad in the theatre with the Lord Chamberlain playing Mordred.

Hill castigated the press for collectively maintaining ‘a conspiracy of silence about the more solid work that the Lord Chamberlain does’. If only more people knew what he had to deal with on a daily basis, they would realise that he was on the side of the angels. So Hill detailed some examples: ‘Indecent language is a commonplace’, he declared, somewhat embroidering reality: ‘Cunt and fuck if not daily are recurring deletions’. In fact there are very few ‘cunts’ to be found in the archive, and ‘fucks’ are relatively few and far between especially before 1962. Hill also cited examples of recent scripts where only the Lord Chamberlain’s last minute interventions had spared audiences from having to endure a variety of unthinkable encounters:

A play taking the class war into the Royal Air Force where officers are all homosexuals and the NCOs thugs . . . A play based on the pleasant theme of a young man being able to overcome any woman’s virtue in five minutes whether he knew her or not . . . a sketch mocking the Crucifixion . . . a man exhibited on the stage with all the symptoms of a male orgasm . . . One set at a public school where an older boy seduces a junior boy . . . a girl of fifteen who has already slept with all the boys in the top class at school [who] runs off with one of the younger masters and starts a magnificent brothel in the West End . . . the flagellation of a woman for her own erotic fascination . . . description of a woman brought into a hospital by two policemen who have twice raped her in the back of the police car . . . a play which mocks the Holy communion which is celebrated with a bottle of Coco-cola, a wrapped sandwich, lighter fuel and an ashtray.

Even in the face of the above—and more—passing across his desk, Hill remained optimistic that the recent drift away from proper values and expectations might soon be reversed, and that the pendulum would swing again: ‘So far, since the war, the movement has been all in one direction, and it has gone an astonishing way’, he wrote; ‘but there are slight signs of public reaction’. If that swing came, he promised, ‘the Censor will move with it’. But as the sixties played out,